Below is a video that Raafi recently made with Brad, a conversation about light and story. And below that is the story from Filmmaker.
Growing up in Louisville, Ky., Bradford Young had his life planned out for him. It was expected, like all the males in his family, that after college Young would return home to take over the family business of running a funeral home. “I come from four generations of morticians,” says Young, 31. “But I was so interested in the arts, I always tried to figure out how I’d do the family business but also do art.” Spending a lot of his childhood in art galleries, attending local theater and listening to his uncle (folk musician Leon Bibb) playing blues at family events, Young itched to express himself. After his mother passed away in 1993 he moved to Chicago to live with his father and there he was introduced to photography through the tutelage of Pulitzer-prizewinning photographer John H. White, and later, when attending Howard University, began to get into cinematography. “I spent a lot of time [at Howard] thinking of images through photo journalism,” he says, “learning where the camera goes, where the right place for the camera to be, really being a custodian of the moment instead of just being ushered into the moment.”
With the funeral home a distant memory, Young received his MFA in ’04 from Howard, and three years later his work garnered attention when he lensed Dee Rees’s short, Pariah, which won the Audience Award at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival. His profile continues to rise with the two distinctly different projects he shot that are currently on the festival circuit: Tina Mabry’s Southern family drama, Mississippi Damned, and Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s gripping immigrant story, Entre Nos. Young says both films highlight his sensibilities on lighting. “I’m constantly battling this idea of reconstructive reality with artificial things,” he says. “I’m always concerned that my intrusion of technology will take audiences out of the moment, so my ideal situation is to shoot with available light.” He continues, “In Mississippi Damned I really tried to figure out ways to do scenes without focusing lights or aiming lights. I discovered black silks on that film and used them a lot. I continued that for Entre Nos – there are these heartfelt conversations and there’s something about the essence of raw light in those scenes that sucks you in. It’s really hard to recreate that [feeling] with film lights.”
Currently working on Rees’s feature version of Pariah, Young tries to work constantly between features, whether it be on commercials, music videos, or even American Idol, as earlier this year he shot Alicia Keys visiting Africa for the show’s philanthropy segment. “I’m always concerned about not getting enough practice as a cinematographer,” he says. “I always want to practice how to lens situations but also interactions – getting to know new people and discovering things in them.”
Occasionally, an unused idea for a location or shot will be called into service for another production — a tracking shot of the New York skyline, say — but the ones that are temporally dependent like construction sites fritter away slowly on the vine. We hope that somewhere, in that great location graveyard in the sky, all the shot ideas that never quite made it onto film or tape loop endlessly to their heart’s content.
One photo is circa 1980, by Bruce Davidson (from “Subway”) the others are by me circa like last month. I dislike both scenarios, and I believe they have a lot in common. I like to think about which world I would rather live in and why… Having lived in both, I might prefer order. You?
For as much time as I have spent waxing on about flat, graphiccompositions, vast depth is also deeply compelling. The thought crossed my mind as I flew home last weekend that sunset, as seen from above the clouds, will make a pious man out of a sinner  at least for the duration of an east-bound flight from Las Vegas. It begs mention that any non-trivial shift in perspective provokes contemplation not of the nectar that we sip daily, but of the whole fruit itself. Boom-shots!
The camera cranes up at the end of any classically structured movie. As it does, our grip on the details loosens. If the film has had any affect, we drift into the dreamy darkness of music and credits for just a second before we hear seats snap back into place and the velcro sound of sneakers on a sticky floor. In flight, this moment can glow for some time as the camera continuously cranes above the action  particularly when the drama is comprised of the sun’s final bow.
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.â€Â
my rims are matte The Raafmonster and MHB were in Harlem this morning scouting locations. We snapped our pics and moseyed down the 125. Raafi took a few bonus shots and said “I think you might need to email those to me”. And so here they are. My friend’s got a crush on Depth of Field and on Flat Planes. It may seem to be at odds, but they kiss close like jimmies and soft serve. iced for daze
This summer I keep meeting new photographers. They run the gamut – cell phone experimenters, studio theorists and some who rock large format. And so I’ve been looking at heaps of photos and wondering if and how our relationships with these images have changed in the digital era. Do they carry the same emotional weight when shared and seen onscreen as opposed to in print? It’s obviously more efficient for all parties, but lately I’ve resolved to print more and email less.
